The Song of Bernadette

 February 12 is the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes.

This is how the grotto of Lourdes looks in this century:

I was there in 2004 -  how is it so long?     And also experienced the candlelight procession which happens just about each evening, where thousands of pilgrims carry candles and say the rosary together, in about ten different languages

I vividly remember reading Franz Werfel's novel The Song of Bernadette  when I was about ten years old.  It made an enormous impression on me.

Bernadette was about 15 years old, from a large, impoverished family, and in poor health.

On February 12, 1858, she was out gathering wood for the fire at home, and gathering it in a dump, when the lady appeared to her.  Bernadette called her "the lady"  and also "Aquero" which means "that one" in the local dialect.

In one of the later visions, the lady called herself "I am the Immaculate Conception".  Bernadette had not heard that expression before; the parish priest had to tell her that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was born free from original sin - a doctrine proclaimed just 4 years before all this happened.

This is a long and moving story.  The book tells it better than I can.

At the intersection of Pagan and Christian

 It's the feast of Saint Brigid of Kildare.  

Here are some interesting pictures and information about her.... and perhaps, about us.

and   

and

02/01/23 St Brigid of Ireland (451?-525) She was born at Faughart, near Dundalk, in Ireland. She was a milkmaid who was converted through the preaching of St Patrick, and with whom she prays as the patron of Erin.

Indeed, the legends of her life abound. A beautiful woman who saw, in her society, her beauty as an obstacle to the will of God in her life, it is said she was temporarily disfigured so as to pursue the Monastic vocation.

Please note this is no pious eccentricity. In a world in which women were either the possession of one man or doomed to be possessed by every man; in which women were either seen as chattel or a sorceress, to choose monastic chastity was to state loudly that in Jesus she had found a Saviour that gave her worth in and of herself.

Her name is that of the pagan goddess of fire, her symbol the Cross, made of reed from her cell. She is known to have imitated her Saviour in making beer from water, and was a healer and reconciler of factions. She founded the first monastic communities in Ireland, made of men and women, and died at her monastery in Kildare in 525.

She is buried next to her friends St Patrick and St Columba.

She remains an ancestor in faith that reminds us all that in Jesus we are chosen for love, selected for life and saved for eternity. Wherever we are today, we can find the Cross (Brigid saw it in the straw on the floor of her room!) embrace and proclaim it, wear on the heart and announce it with the mouth.

How? By loving simply, simply loving.

Wear green today, or her cross!

by M. Dennis McCarron